What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it
www.theregister.com
'Our licenses aren't working anymore,' says free software pioneer

TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.

He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.

It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.

What are your thoughts on it?

  • Lmaydev@programming.dev
    454·
    10 months ago

    I mean just license it as such right? You can’t say it’s completely free for anyone to use then complain you aren’t getting paid.

    • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
      453·
      10 months ago

      This is a common misconception. A couple times, it’s even gone to court. Both Cisco and Best Buy had to pay nontrivial amounts of money, and in the case of Best Buy, it hilariously had to give to the plaintiffs its inventory of TVs which contained software copyrighted and GPL-licensed by the plaintiffs.

      GPL licensed does not in any world mean “completely free for anyone to use”. For end-users, it does. For companies that want to resell the GPL-licensed software, it means, you can do it for free if you comply with the terms of the license, and if you don’t, then you can’t. There’s not a monetary exchange, but there are licensing terms you need to comply with which were apparently important enough to the people that wrote the software for them to apply that particular license instead of some other one.

      If you disagree, that’s completely fine, but that doesn’t mean you can all of a sudden resell their software and use their work for free, even if there are other people (in compliance with the license) who can.

      • PixxlMan@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 months ago

        GPL isn’t the only open source license. This comment is beyond bizarre because it seems to imply that all open source software is GPL? And of course when software is licensed as GPL, that license can be enforced when someone breaks it (like your example). The original comment never mentioned GPL, it was about when something was licensed ss free. So when you give an example where it wasn’t licensed as such, what was the point?

        • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          10 months ago

          The entire linked article is talking about “open source” in terms of the GPL specifically.

      • Lmaydev@programming.dev
        21·
        10 months ago

        That’s all well and good. But it still doesn’t change the whole not getting paid issue. Unless they violated the license lol

        • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          10 months ago

          Violating the (spirit of) the license (without violating the letter, because of loopholes in the license) is exactly what Perens is talking about.

          He’s not “complaining he isn’t getting paid.” I think it’s pretty rare that the people working on open source software are actually hurting for money or anything. He’s complaining that the actual practice of how the software is being used, RHEL and Android on phones and etc, isn’t doing well at reflecting the vision of the computing world the GPL was supposed to create. Then, as one possible solution, he’s proposing to kill two birds with one stone with a new license where the companies that are skirting the license right now can have to fund the development of particular types of open source software that need to get done anyway but is lacking right now (because of lack of profit motive).

          You might or might not agree with his thesis; as much as I think it’s interesting and insightful I have some reservations about it. I just thought you were misunderstanding his whole argument as being in terms of money, that’s all.

    • Actual@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Well the question is, how would such a license look like? Or would it be a contract and not a license?

      I guess I should ask a lawyer these questions, but I wanted to see what others here thought about the idea.

      • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        10 months ago

        This to me is a good question. The lack of something concrete that sounds like “yes, that would definitely work” is something that makes me have reservations about this whole thesis… but that said I think it has some merit.

        Mysql and Qt already have a pretty solid model, where there’s a GPL-enabled alternative that the community can use, or you can pay a fee to use the commercial version. You could scale that up to something where if you want to pay a certain fee, you can use lots of currently-GPL software (maybe any that’s been assigned to the FSF or something with the FSF shepherding the whole thing). Then, we can stop the sort of benign neglect of companies that are sloppy with their licensing of uboot or Busybox, and just tell them to start paying the fee if they don’t feel like dotting all their "i"s as far as licensing, and then use the fees to fund development of open source software that’s needed but doesn’t have a lot of motivated developers working on it.

        I’m not as convinced that it’s necessary as Perens is. Like I think he overblows by quite a lot the impact of RHEL skirting their licensing, because in his mind RHEL is such a big part of the computing world when in reality it’s not. But it sounds like he’s describing real problems and the solutions make some version of good sense to me.